“It is difficult to resist the conclusion
that the loss of political liberty had somehow stifled the spirit of
individual initiative. It is a striking fact, as we have seen, that
after the second Century AD literature and art had suffered complete
decay. The same phenomenon occurred in the sphere of local
self-government. Finding that they were in no real sense the master
of their own destiny, men lost the sense of individual
responsibility. …Under a bureaucratic government subordinates came
to rely on the guidance of their chief; and few were likely to
undertake the responsibility of independent action, the credit for
which, if it succeeded would go to their imperial master, the blame,
if it should fail, be visited upon themselves.”
— Cyril Robinson, History of Rome, second edition, 1941

Call me crazy and you'll join a long line of
persons who have already done so, but it does seem to me that it is
little wonder that art and literature decayed dramatically in the
period following the hunting down and murder of
Cicero
who was one of Rome’s most famous authors. Why was Cicero, an
author whose body of work was so vast, and whose influence was so
great that up to the 19th Century nearly every author was regarded as
either reacting against or returning to his style, hunted down and
killed? Oh, he said some things that upset Marc Antony, who was
politically powerful at the time. Early in the First Century BC.,
Antony had Cicero hunted throughout Italy and on being found, had him
killed and his head and hands brought back to Rome where they were
nailed to the Rostrum for all to see. Something of an object lesson
there for the budding author, yes? One would think.

So, today, we have Hillary Rodham Clinton and her
apparently evil psychopath husband Bill Clinton who were not content
with mass murder in Texas, in Somalia, in Kosovo, and elsewhere, but
also have continued to engage in revenge killings, it would seem, if
we are to judge by the continuing deaths that dog everyone who ever
speaks out against them. Just recently a doctor, whose dead body was
found by his eleven-year-old daughter sitting in a bathtub with a
knife plunged into his chest, was noteworthy for having pointed out
that the Clinton Foundation had raised great amounts of money for
Haiti relief and did not perform any meaningful relief activities in
Haiti. I will not dignify the thought that his truth telling
constituted “criticism” nor that his death should be
regarded as a suicide, although those ideas are being reported in the
hoax stream media.

The cost of keeping an overseas empire is very
high. It is high in dollar terms, because of all the expenses of
deploying troops to about 900 military bases (that we know about) and
keeping them alive and occasionally capable of fighting against
various “enemies” real and imaginary. Much of the dollar
cost is paid over to corrupt contractor companies that rent seek for
special deals and buy off politicians, so there is an obvious
“benefit” to politicians and bureau-rats and military
contractor companies in spending these dollars. Of course, there is
also a huge cost in the lives of American soldiers, in the lives of
foreign soldiers and civilians, and in the blowback which comes when
the survivors of dead people overseas engage in acts of retribution,
often against handy targets such as American civilians. The cost of
empire includes your difficulties when you travel, the supposed
“security” provided by having your body cavities probed
by the filthy hands of disgusting TSA “agents” and the
disinclination of people all over the world to be especially
welcoming of Americans. Try opening a bank account in another country
if you don’t think your welcome is limited and thin.

The system you live under is a plantation of
slavery that was designed by Washington and Hamilton. Abraham Lincoln
put all the American people on that plantation. Franklin Roosevelt
began slaughtering Americans for profit. And Richard Nixon took away
all pretence that you are entitled to get ahead in the hoax stream
economy by demolishing the last connection between the dollar and
precious metals. Since 1971, the disparity between the richest and
the poorest has grown dramatically, and the middle class have been
attacked, deprived, and destroyed, repeatedly.

The comparisons are many and varied and ought to
be considered, but they are too numerous for this essay. Suffice to
say that if you want to find monuments to the stupidity of the USA
government, you need not look very hard to find them.

Happily, for the last 35 years, a large number of
computer enthusiasts have been hard at work figuring out how to fix
these problems. We have developed a wide array of technologies for
communications privacy, data security, and financial autonomy.
Efforts to control freedom or to limit in any way are extremely
tiresome, and, today, very easy to circumvent.

A time is coming when the politicians who have
been raping, fondling, and murdering children, who have a huge slush
fund in Congress to pay for the silence of their many victims, and
who eagerly accept more and more money to distribute borrowed money
while repeatedly increasing the “debt ceiling” and
pretending to care what their constituents think, are going to lose
all their power. Some, I suspect, are also going to lose their lives,
possibly after losing various body parts to the angry families of
their victims. As ever, I need not lift a finger nor encourage a
single action for me to be sure that all that needs to be done is
going to happen. If I’m expected to shed a tear for the death
of a child rapist, feel free to explain why that would be.

Many changes are coming. The “fall of
Rome” though, should not be lamented. Rome was a corrupt,
inefficient, bureau-rat ridden, and evil atrocity in itself, and not
in any way a contributor to art, science, or learning. The world was
well shed of Rome itself, a parasitical city that brought huge
amounts of wealth from many parts of the world to itself through
various forms of extortion. Until one day when they ran out of other
people’s money.

Jim Davidson is an author, entrepreneur,
and story-teller. He blogs at ResilientWays.net and at
Twitter.com/planetaryjim and is occasionally willing to post a thing
or two on Facebook or LinkedIn. He’s been writing white papers
for crypto currencies and doing all manner of other subversive things
for many decades.

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